The eclipse of the media: no longer so influential, by 57Nomad.

The total average viewership over a 24-hour period for Fox News, CNN and MSNBC combined increased 7% in 2015 to an average of 1.9 million. For CNN, that meant 23% growth to 490,000; for MSNBC, 2% growth to 352,000; and for Fox News, 3% growth to 1.1 million viewers.”

Trump can hit many times that amount in a single tweet. This is the disintermediation of news. They asked for it. They thought they would win because they always have. They thought they would win because they could control all of the organs of influence and silence all dissent. Like Chamberlain at Little Round Top, Trump so unexpectedly and savagely flanked his flatfooted adversaries by his use of the internet and social media and his comical manipulation of a press that hated him into doing his bidding.

Influential!?!?! Ha ha ha. They are the vanquished in the most thorough and brutal public beating in political history. They influence only themselves; recent events have shown them to be nothing but loser hacks. They watched from the Losers Only platform as across the way, from Winning Station, The Deplorable Trump Train rocketed off into the future.

Climate Coup—The Politics, by David Evans, from 2012.

In Europe several hundred years ago the Church had a monopoly on distributing high quality information — via the pulpit.

Then along came the printing press, which broke the monopoly. Soon afterwards came the Reformation, and eventually the Enlightenment, and the Church’s status, wealth, and power fell substantially.

For the last few decades in western society, the mainstream media have had a monopoly on distributing information. Now the Internet is dissolving that monopoly; climate change is the first major public issue where the Internet affected the outcome. …

The mainstream media is largely denied to [climate] skeptics, so they communicate via the Internet and talkback radio. …

The regulating class are being defeated by a rag-tag army of mainly disorganized amateurs, because the skeptics have the data on their side. The big lesson here is that the Internet trumps the mainstream media, it just takes a while. The suppressed data gets through eventually. Without the Internet, the meme of manmade global warming almost certainly be dominant and the coup at Copenhagen would have succeeded.